By Philip Jenkins
August 18, 2003
Courtesy Of: History News Network
Mr. Jenkins is the author, most recently, of Images of Terror: What We Can And Can't Know About Terrorism (Aldine De Gruyter).
Though Americans may be a little fuzzy about identifying their deadliest enemies in the Middle East, they have few doubts that the chief demon-figures are solidly Muslim.
Thirty or so years ago, Palestinian Arab terrorists and hijackers clearly represented the deadliest threat to the West, only to be replaced in the 1980s by Shi'ite groups like Hizbullah, and more recently by the still deadlier al-Qaeda.
Behind these frightening names lurk the so-called bandit-states, like Syria, Iran, Libya, and (until recently) Iraq -- all Arab, with the obvious exception of Iran. The names may vary, but at first sight, the story seems to be a straightforward case of radical Islam versus the West.
Ever since September 11, a whole academic growth industry has traced the Islamic origins of terrorism and fanaticism, from Quranic calls to jihad through the history of the Assassins - though authors offer the obligatory nod to the peaceful and tolerant nature of Islam as a religion.
Just when the picture starts to become clear, though, we notice some odd features about the Muslim threat, namely that substantial sections of it do not appear Muslim at all.
For years after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the public face of that nation's diplomacy was deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz, who was born with the distinctly Christian name Michael Yuhanna. Hafiz al-Asad, who made Syria a bastion of Arab radicalism and anti-Israel fervor, was an Alawite, a member of a secretive esoteric sect that has only tenuous Islamic credentials, and Alawites control every organ of the Syrian state.
Asad himself was surrounded by non-Muslim counselors. British author William Dalrymple suggests that by the 1990s, five out of Asad's seven closest advisors were Christian.
Until recently, Christians were still more obvious in the ranks of the Palestinian movements challenging Israel.
At least until the rise of the Muslim movement Hamas in 1987, most of the notorious terrorist militants were men of Christian origin, like George Habash, Wadi Haddad, and Nayef Hawatmeh.
Through the 1970s, a great deal of blood was shed as Palestinians tried to force Israel to release one of its most important captives, Hilarion Capucci, a Melkite Catholic bishop in communion with the Vatican. Bishop Capucci had been arrested for smuggling weapons for the PLO.
Today, the suave symbol of the Palestinian cause in the West is yet another Christian, Hanan Ashrawi. In Palestinian history especially, armed Arab militancy looks rather more like a crusade than a jihad.
I stress the word "history," since this Christian role is fading fast. In Palestine today, as across the Middle East generally, non-Muslim populations are experiencing a steep decline in numbers and influence, while radical Islamic movements are in the ascendant. To that extent, the American stereotype of its enemies is accurate, or is becoming so.
But if we want to understand the origins of Middle Eastern politics, and especially the region's heritage of extremism and violence, we have to move beyond the clichés about jihad, or indeed, about Islam in general. Often, the sources of Arab militancy, of radicalism and terrorism, lie entirely outside Islam, and should often be located in Europe.
This perspective is all the more important given the recent conflict with the Ba'thist regime of Iraq, a government that in many ways represents a fossil of the older politics of the region. This interpretation does not make the former Iraqi regime any more or less acceptable, but it might begin to explain the hotly debated relationship between Saddam's regime and "Islamism."
The reason non-Muslim minorities are so important in Middle Eastern affairs can be sketched quickly. Through the twentieth century, two key facts shaped Arab politics.
The first was that of diversity. At least in mid-century, several of the most significant Arab lands were impressively heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity and religion.
Though the mass of the population generally accepted the mainstream tradition of Sunni Islam, there were significant minority groups, such as the Christians. These minorities were often prosperous and educated, and politically active.
Their leaders were increasingly alarmed about the rapid growth of Islam, which should be counted as the second critical trend. Looking at the very different birth rates found among the religious minorities and the poor Muslim masses, it was not difficult to predict a time when a politicized Islam would become an overwhelming social and cultural force.
Diversity In The Middle East
Contemplating the juggernaut power of Islam, especially in its Sunni form, Arab Christians and other minorities realized that their position in the Middle East would become intolerable, and they would be forced to emigrate or convert.
The worst-case scenario involved a repetition of the horrendous massacres and expulsions that uprooted Christian communities across the Ottoman and Turkish worlds between 1915 and 1925.
In responding to this threat, Christians tried to become the leaders of Arab politics, to create secular movements not defined by religion, to ensure that Christians and other minorities would not be overwhelmed by Muslim numbers.
This point about diversity may surprise Americans, who are used to thinking of their own land as the world's most varied, while Middle Eastern countries are seen as monolithically Muslim.
Nothing could be further from the truth. By global standards, the United States is religiously quite homogeneous, since barely five percent of Americans follow non-Christian religions, while most "Muslim" countries traditionally include much larger minorities.
These include the Christians, of course -- all those Anthonys, Michaels, and Georges who appear so regularly in the region's politics -- but also a variety of sects holding esoteric (batiniya) views that mainstream Muslims find very suspicious. Some, like the Alawites and Druzes, teach a kind of incarnationism, holding that God has appeared in human form.
Even more horrifying for orthodox Muslims, some groups teach that God represents a Trinity, which includes the prophet's son-in-law, Ali. Whatever their exact doctrinal views -- and these are not easily revealed to outsiders -- these groups would have as much to fear from a rigid Sunni Muslim regime as would the Christians.
At least until recently, the scale of these minority populations was impressive.
Though firm numbers are hard to come by, in the mid-twentieth century, Christians probably made up around 15 or 20 percent of the Palestinian people, 10 percent of Syria, at least 10 percent of Egypt, 5 percent of Iraq. (They comprised a slim majority in Lebanon).
Numbers for the batiniya sects are even harder to pin down, since some make it a virtue to conceal one's religion from potentially oppressive governments. Still, Alawites may make up 13 percent of the people of Syria, while some 6 percent of Lebanese are Druzes.
Until the First World War, minority religions had generally coped well under the rule of the Ottoman empire, but that tolerance collapsed in the conditions of wartime.
From the 1920s, then, the minorities faced a straightforward problem.
How could people who were clearly Arab by ethnicity and language live and flourish in a world that increasingly demanded conformity to Islam, and usually in its Sunni form? Leaving aside the option of emigration, there were basically three possible solutions, two of which are now largely extinct, but the third is very much with us.
All these options reflected the cosmopolitan outlook of the minorities, and above all the Christians, who looked to Europe for their political models. Often, then, when we look at the radical politics of the Arab world, we are actually seeing not Islamic patterns, but rather the influence of Christian or secular Europe.
Three Models Of Survival
The first possibility was to secede from the Arab world altogether, which was the solution attempted in the new Christian-dominated statelet of Lebanon.
Lebanese Christian elites were familiar with contemporary European ideas, and in 1936, the local warlords founded a political party called the Phalange, which explicitly drew on contemporary European fascist examples.
(Lebanese leaders had been highly impressed by the Berlin Olympics.) Initially, the Phalange hoped to rule a Lebanon that looked to Europe, but they had to make ever more compromises with growing Muslim populations.
By the 1970s, Christian power was overwhelmed by rising Muslim numbers -- in this case, Shi'ite rather than Sunni. The Christian failure ensured that there never would be an Arab-speaking New-France-Over-The-Seas.
Across much of the Arab world, many minorities favored a second model, in which religious differences would be subsumed in a non-sectarian political cause. Arab Communist parties began to be founded in the 1920s, and repeatedly, we find the Christians among their strongest supporters.
This explains the otherwise puzzling fact that mapping the centers of Arab Communism also highlights the main Christian cities and towns, from Basra in Iraq to Nazareth and Bethlehem in Palestine.
As European colonialism fragmented, Communists hoped for major political advances across the Arab world, but this political dream too faded during the conflicts of the Cold War. By the 1960s, Communists were reduced to insignificance.
The third solution was much more successful, and this is the one that endures today in countries like Syria and Iraq.
Like the Communist model, this involved Christians and other minorities leading a secular trans-national movement that transcended religious loyalties. Far from being suspect as non-Muslims, Christians and others would demonstrate their passionate Arab loyalty by becoming the leaders of Arab nationalism and pan-Arabist causes.
They would in fact be more enthusiastically and patriotically Arab than their Muslim neighbors. Race would trump religion, allowing Christians to live and lead.
This quest to prove their Arab credentials explains why, throughout the past century, Christians have always been in the front rank of Arab nationalism.
Coptic Christians were prominent in the pioneering nationalist Wafd Party of Egypt in the 1920s. From the 1930s, Arab Christians were deeply influenced by the fascist and ultra-nationalist models they could see in Europe, and they formed their own parties in this mold.
One of the first was the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, founded by Antun Saadeh in 1932. (As his name "Anthony" indicates, he was of course Christian.) Like the various duces and Führers of contemporary Europe, Saadeh wanted to restore the mythical glories of an ancient homeland, in this case, a pre-Muslim Great Syria that had not existed in thousands of years.
Antun Saadeh preached pan-Syrianism, the re-establishment of a Great Syrian empire covering not just modern-day Syria but also Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus, and other stretches of the Near East.
Though his party has never held power (and he himself was executed in 1949), Saadeh's pan-Syrianism is still a potent force in Syrian thought, and thus in regional politics.
When policy-makers look at the hard-line policies of the Asad family's regime in Syria, they should never forget this other crucial dimension, which has nothing to do with Islam or Jihad. As a cornerstone of its foreign policy, the Syrian government desperately wants not only to expel the Jews from Palestine, but to incorporate the whole territory under its own rule.
Daniel Pipes reports that former President Asad was wont to lecture PLO leaders that "You are an integral part of the Syrian people and Palestine is an integral part of Syria."
Osama bin Laden may dream of the ancient Islamic empire, but the Syrians want to push matters back more than a millennium further, to the time of the Assyrians.
In 1940, another Christian thinker launched what would be a still more influential variety of pan-Arabism, namely the Movement for Arab Renaissance (Ba'th).
The key founder was Michel Aflaq, a Syrian who had been educated at the Sorbonne. Ba'thist parties were founded across the Arab world during the 1940s, as local elites prepared for the imminent end of colonial rule by Britain and France.
The Ba'th movement eventually gained power in both Syria (1963) and Iraq (1968). In 1974, Michel Aflaq moved to Baghdad, where he acted as Ba'th elder statesman until his death in 1989.
Though Christians never dominated either Syria or Iraq, they would always be well represented in the movement. As we have seen, the Alawites hold a firm grip on Syria's military and intelligence community. Ba'thism also provided a very firm bastion against Sunni expansion.
In Syria, the classic conflict with mainstream Islam occurred in 1982, when the (Sunni) Muslim Brotherhood tried to organize a rising against a government they viewed as heretical or blasphemous.
The revolt collapsed after Ba'thist forces annihilated the city of Hama, killing perhaps 20,000 residents. The conflict between Islamism and pan-Arabism has never been starker.
In its ideology too, Ba'thism is far removed from any focus of Islam. It preaches the glories of the Arab nation, but not chiefly in its Muslim form.
Aflaq always boasted of the Arab achievement ("The Arab Nation is the ideal around which human history ascends") and spoke highly of Islam, but he was just as enthusiastic about the pre-Islamic past, to the time of Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.
(Compare Antun Saadeh harking back to the Assyrian empire.) And though Aflaq's vision of the Arab nation was apocalyptic, it was not distinctively Muslim, since it drew at least as much on his Orthodox Christian heritage, mystical and messianic. In fact, Aflaq on the Arabs sounds a lot like the Russian Orthodox hymning Tsarist Russia.
As David Brooks points out, these exalted ideas deeply influenced Saddam Hussein, with his mystical view of the Arab nation, "the source of all prophets and the cradle of civilization." Time and again, Saddam extolled the Arabs or Iraq, but not until recently did he refer to Islamic precedents.
He was after all the prime mover in the attempt literally to rebuild ancient Babylon. Only in the last few years, as international threats mounted, did Saddam find it politically useful to portray himself as a devout Muslim.
Ideology apart, the Ba'th movement also imported into the Arab world critical aspects of contemporary Mediterranean fascism, elements that would have a broad influence on regional politics.
Like Italian or German fascism, the new pan-Arab party was to be highly disciplined, its members were to represent a select minority of the elite, and it was fascinated with themes of conspiracy, putsch and coup d'etat. It was also highly suspicious of outsiders, often to the point of blatant paranoia. Most significant for later events, Arab nationalists were deeply influenced by the Italian deployment of international terrorism as a means of destabilizing hostile powers.
Through the 1930s, the Italian secret services made systematic use of covert warfare, often through proxies representing disaffected minority groups, including the Palestinian Arabs.
The Ba'thists who eventually gained power in Syria and Iraq were heirs to a decades-long tradition of conspiracy, assassination and international terrorism, and needed no lessons either from the Soviet KGB, or from later Islamists.
And this tradition owed far more to Benito Mussolini than to the legendary founder of the Assassins, still less to the Quran.
Origins Of Arab Terrorism
With this background in mind, we can better understand the origins of "Arab terrorism," a phrase that for many Americans seems like one word rather than two.
Some of those origins were definitely Islamic, through revolutionary movements like the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
But the modern phase of international terrorism that began in the 1960s has much more to do with Christianity, and the Middle East's other minority faiths.
Critical here were the Palestinians, among whom the Christian minority represented a well-informed political elite, who took the lead in political activism.
They exactly fit the model suggested here, of minorities proving their ultra-nationalist credentials in a predominantly Muslim society.
The Palestinian militants of the 1960s were often Christians who had been educated in western settings, at French universities, or the American University of Beirut. Here they encountered heady political currents like Communism, Ba'thism, and pan-Syrianism.
In the 1960s, these ideas inspired a new wave of militant organizations that would experiment with novel military tactics, especially attacks on airliners and airports. The most important group was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by Arabs of Christian stock, like George Habash and Wadi Haddad.
The PFLP had a strongly Christian and Orthodox component, to the extent that Orthodox priests reputedly blessed hijack teams before they set out on attacks.
The PFLP split into a number of other groups, including the PFLP-General Command, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, but throughout, we find this Christian presence. Through the years of most intense international terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s, the key Palestinian groups were most conspicuous by their lack of connection to Islam or to Muslim movements.
They were often Christian-led, like the PFLP "family", or they worked for and with the regimes of Iraq and Syria.
Just how Arab radical politics acquired the Muslim coloring they undoubtedly have today is a complex story, but we should stress how recently all this has happened.
The crucial decade was the 1980s, which marked a drastic shift to religious militancy. In those years, the older Palestinian groups were discredited by repeated failures, while the movement was galvanized by new Islamist organizations like Hamas. At the same time, the most successful armed organizations were clearly religious-oriented, like the Lebanese Hizbullah, with its devastatingly successful methods of suicide-bombing.
The Islamic revolution in Iran likewise inspired many would-be imitators. Over the past decade, all the major Middle Eastern terrorist groups have been Muslim and, in most cases, strictly orthodox Sunnis, who have no sympathy for older radicals - though they enthusiastically borrowed their tactics, like airline hijacking.
Even when calling on Muslims to defend Iraq, new radical leaders like Osama bin Laden have nothing but contempt for its "Communist" and secular leaders. In response, leaders like Saddam Hussein got religion, or affected to do so.
As a supreme irony, in their obituaries for arch-secularist Michel Aflaq, the Iraqi media declared that he had experienced a deathbed conversion to Islam.
Meanwhile, mass emigration meant that Christian populations were collapsing across the region.
Christians now make up barely half a percent of the Arabs of Israel and Palestine, and there was little protest when a recent draft constitution for a state of Palestine stated unashamedly that the new state would be Muslim in character, and presumably Sunni.
Without much of a popular base for non-sectarian politics - at least outside Syria - there are no obvious alternatives to Islam as the dominant social and cultural force in the Arab world. To that extent, the ancient fears have come true: the Sunni Muslim juggernaut really has prevailed.
Though Americans were deeply divided over the Iraq war, virtually nobody regrets the passing of the Saddam Hussein regime, which was a worthy descendant of the bloodiest traditions of European totalitarianism.
But it is a sad irony that when the U.S. did crush this regime, it was erasing the last dim traces of what was once a worthwhile idea, namely the attempt to create a secular order in which the Middle East's religious minorities could survive and flourish. That idea deserves a far better monument than Saddam Hussein.
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